“The question has been asked whether the suffering of industrially-raised chickens could be scientifically eliminated. What if scientists
could create chickens and other farmed animals whose ‘adjustment’ to pathogenicity consisted in their inability to experience their own
existence?” Please read this entire blog & circulate. Appreciative comments on One Green Planet directly following this article are
welcome and – appreciated.
Eliminating the Suffering of
Chickens Bred for Meat
By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United
Poultry Concerns
"The misery of egg-laying birds has been
well-documented, but what about the life of chickens
bred for eating?" Andrew Purvis, "Pecking
Order," The Guardian, Sept. 23, 2006.
Chickens are the largest number of land animals bred
specifically for human consumption. Globally, more than
40 billion chickens are slaughtered each year for meat
out of an estimated 65 billion animals killed annually
for this purpose. Nine billion chickens die in the
United States alone each year. Approximately 5 billion
egg-laying hens are in battery cages throughout the
world, many of them in production complexes holding a
million or more birds.
Despite the disparity in numbers, battery-caged hens
have received much more attention to their plight than
chickens bred for meat have received. One reason, I
believe, is that the suffering of egg-laying hens in
battery cages is much more dramatically apparent to most
people than the suffering of chickens in broiler sheds.
Hens crammed together in battery cages allow an onlooker
to distinguish a few hens out of thousands, and images
of their suffering and frustration, their entanglement
in wires and beating of their wings against cage bars,
disturb even people who are unfamiliar with chickens. By
contrast, chickens bred for meat are not raised in
cages, although this could change by the end of the
twenty-first century.
Chickens bred for meat are raised to six weeks old on
floors in long low sheds the size of football fields,
where they appear in their first week of life as
thousands of indistinguishable yellow chicks, eating,
drinking, and mixing with the sawdust and wood chips. In
the weeks that follow, their weight multiplies many
times over until, sitting heavily and inert in layers of
excrement, lame and in pain, they appear to a person
standing in the doorway of the stench-filled shed like
lumps of dough stretching into the dark.
Photo: David Harp
My own acquaintance with "broiler" chickens began in
the mid-1980s when my husband and I rented a house on a
piece of land that included a backyard chicken shed in
Maryland. One day in June about a hundred young chickens
appeared in the shed. A few weeks later the chickens
were huge. I knew little about chickens at the time, but
I was impressed by how crippled they were.
The chicken industry tells the public that thanks to
research, better management, diet and other
improvements, poultry diseases have been practically
eliminated. However, industry publications and my own
experience tell a totally different story. A big part of
this story concerns what has been done to chickens
genetically to create a heavy, fast-growing bird,
falsely promoted to consumers as "healthy," even though
poultry is considered the most common cause of foodborne
illness in consumer households.
Chickens bred for meat have been rendered ill and
unfit as a result of genetic manipulation, unwholesome
diets, drugs, antibiotics, and the toxic air and bedding
in the sheds where they live in almost complete
darkness. Their bodies are abnormal. As I wrote in my
book Prisoned
Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the
Modern Poultry Industry, "When you pick up
a chicken on the road who has fallen off a truck on the
way to slaughter, the huge white bird with the little
peeping voice and baby blue eyes feels like liquid
cement."
Even if you rescue a chicken from a poultry shed at
one day old, the pathologies built into the bird will
emerge in the form of cardiovascular disease, crippled
joints, and an unnatural gait. The breast muscle grows
large and pendulous, and excess fat squeezes the
internal organs, impairing the bird's ability to
breathe. Respiratory distress is innate in these birds.
In the 1970s, a chicken farmer wrote, ironically, about
the new type of chicken then being bred, that "the sign
of a good meat flock is the number of birds dying from
heart attacks." This remains true today.
The chicken industry tells the public that the
"physical welfare" of chickens is very important to the
industry, and that economic profitability cannot be
achieved without careful attention to welfare. But that
is not how the system actually works. Chickens bred for
meat do not balloon out of all proportion in their
infancy because they are content and well-cared for, but
because they are artificially manipulated through
genetics and management techniques to produce this
outcome. In addition, they are slaughtered as babies,
before diseases and death have decimated the flocks as
they would otherwise do, even with all the drugs.
The question has been asked whether the suffering of
industrially-raised chickens could be scientifically
eliminated. What if scientists could create chickens and
other farmed animals whose "adjustment" to pathogenicity
consisted in their inability to experience their own
existence? In the early 1990s, an engineer predicted
that the future of chicken and egg production would come
to resemble "industrial-scale versions of the heart-lung
machines that brain-dead human beings need a court order
to get unplugged from" (Robert Burruss, "The Future of
Eggs," The Baltimore Sun, Dec. 29,
1993). As long as they don't "feel" anything, is it
ethical to do this to chickens?
Agribusiness philosopher Paul Thompson has argued that
if blind chickens "don't mind" being crowded together in
confinement as much as do chickens who can see, it would
"improve animal welfare" to breed blind chickens (Paul
Thompson. "Welfare as an Ethical Issue: Are Blind
Chickens the Answer?" in Bioethics Symposium,
USDA, Jan. 23, 2007). A breeder of featherless chickens
in Israel claims "welfare" benefits for naked chickens
on factory farms, despite the fact that feathers help to
protect the birds' delicate skin from injuries and
infections, which is all the more necessary in an
environment that is as thick with aerial pollution and
ammoniated, fecal-soaked floors as industrial chicken
sheds are. Philosopher Peter Singer, asked if he would
consider it ethical to engineer a "brainless bird,"
grown strictly for meat, said he would consider it "an
ethical improvement on the present system, because it
would eliminate the suffering that these birds are
feeling" (Oliver Broudy, "The
Practical Ethicist," Salon, May 8,
2006.)
But would it eliminate the suffering these birds are
enduring? What if the chicken's brain could be
scientifically expunged? What if the elements of memory,
instinct, sensation and emotion could be eliminated and
a brainless chicken constructed? In the United Kingdom,
an architecture student named Andre Ford has proposed
what he calls the "Headless Chicken Solution" to the
suffering of chickens on factory farms. (Olivia Solon, "Food
project proposes Matrix-style vertical chicken farms."
Wired, Feb. 15, 2012)
Drawing on Paul Thompson's "Blind Chicken Solution,"
Ford envisions the removal of the chicken's cerebral
cortex. Removing the cerebral cortex, he says, would
inhibit the bird's sensory perceptions so that chickens
could be mass-produced without awareness of themselves
or their situation in a technologized universe that
would make it easier for the chicken industry to make
even more money facilitating ever greater consumption of
chicken products by a growing global human population.
Ford equates removing the chicken's brain with the
"removal of suffering," but the suffering of chickens on
factory farms is a matter of more complexity than
science fiction and conventional "welfare" solutions can
address. Chicken brain removal, far from removing
suffering, takes suffering – the condition of injury or
trauma whether consciously felt or not– to the ultimate
limit of destroying the integrity of the bird as such.
It accords with the agribusiness view of farmed animals
as mere biological raw material to be manipulated at
will.
Already, according to a poultry industry manual, "The
technology built into buildings and equipment [is]
embodied genetically into the chicken itself" (Bell and
Weaver, Commercial Chicken Meat and Egg
Production, 5th edition, 2002). Taking
this "embodiment" to the ultimate extreme of total avian
degradation is not the answer. If there is going to be
humanely-produced chicken in the future, the burgeoning
technology of "beyond meat," which replicates the
texture and taste of chicken flesh using all-plant
ingredients, will end the animal suffering, save the
birds, be kinder to the planet and better for us. It
will truly be something to crow about. (Brad Stone, "Venture
Capital Sees Promise in Lab-Created Eco-Foods," Bloomberg
BusinessWeek, Jan. 24, 2013.)
KAREN
DAVIS, PhD is the President of United Poultry
Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the
compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl
including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. She is
the author of several books including Prisoned
Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern
Poultry Industry (2009).
http://www.upc-online.org
Karen Davis, PhD, President
United Poultry Concerns
PO Box 150
Machipongo, VA 23405
Office: 757-678-7875
Email: Karen@upc-online.org